Member Review

‘Believers in her innocence call her Anna O. Believers in her guilt call her Sleeping Beauty.’

My thanks to HarperCollins U.K. for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Anna O’ by Matthew Blake.

In August 2019 Anna Ogilvy was found asleep in her cabin at a farmhouse retreat, wearing bloodstained clothing. A large kitchen knife was close by. In a nearby cabin the bodies of her two best friends, Indira and Douglas, were found. Forensics identified the blood on Anna’s clothing as theirs and her fingerprints on the knife. Yet Anna hasn’t opened her eyes since.

Given Anna’s privileged background and the nature of the crime, it became a media sensation. Four years later and the CPS want the case to go to trial but Anna has to be awake and competent to do so. As a result, she is being transferred to the Abbey Sleep Clinic, under the direction of Professor Virginia Bloom.

Prof. Bloom calls in Dr Benedict Prince, a sleep doctor who studies people who commit crimes when they sleep. Ben hopes to use his innovative techniques to wake Anna. No further details to avoid spoilers.

This work of psychological suspense is Blake’s debut. I found it a fascinating, twisty thriller that kept me guessing. Blake refers to a number of Hitchcock films along the way as Ben often watches them and compares himself to various of Hitchcock’s male characters.

Blake also examines the rise in popularity of True Crime, including some of its darker elements. Anna herself was researching an investigative piece for the magazine she cofounded on the case of Sally Turner, who in 1999 was accused of murdering her two stepchildren in Stockwell with a kitchen knife. At her trial Sally had claimed that she was sleepwalking. Clearly there are echoes of Anna’s case twenty years later.

There is a lot of information about the psychology of sleep and sleep related disorders within the narrative. While I have been interested in dreaming, much of this was new information.

Overall, I found ‘Anna O’, a slow burn novel that delivered on the suspense with the kind of twists that impressed for how neatly they changed my perception of what was going on.